Side effects of being Software Engineer
If you wake up at 3 am with a potential solution for a problem that you have been working for last 2–3 days or you missed the later parts of the chat while talking with your friends because you are still processing its earlier parts or you start deviating from your topic whenever you want let audience understand the sub topics while explaining some thing and when you forget what you were talking about, first thing that comes in your mind is Stack Trace, you are facing (side) effects of being a Software Engineer by DNA.
In my software engineering career of 13+ years, the above situations either has happened to me or are still happening with my daily life. These might be my personal characteristics and does not represent all Software Engineers, however, I have met with many Software Engineers with these symptoms (Yes, these look like symptoms of being Software Engineer and in fact I have been asked multiple times by doctors for my profession and attribute it to my health conditions like headaches, neurological pains, anxiety and tension).
Here are some of side effects of being Software Engineer:
- Overthinking — This is the major side effect I have been facing since I started my career. I can probably say this was actually not side effect of being Software Engineer, rather it was an attribute of my personality way before I chose computers as my career path. It might have made me better Software Engineer in my career. Anyway, whoever comes first chicken or egg, its side effects are clearly visible in my daily routine. Being a Software Engineer, you are supposed to think all possible reasons of a problem when trying to a RCA (Root Cause Analysis). And when it comes to your personal life, you tend to do the same for everything that is happening around you e.g when purchasing anything via online shopping apps, I usually consume too much time in comparing the offers or products compared to other people and most of the time it requires same level of attention that you need while doing RCA. The end result is most of the times good because I manage to apply good discounts.
- Worst case analysis — It is actually a result of overthinking, however, I have kept it as separate side effect because all Software Engineers might not be doing Worst case analysis as the first thing. I mean all of them are supposed to worst case analysis whenever they are looking at a solution for any problem but they might miss it or do it at last. Now coming back to personal life, there were multiple times when I was thinking about such a worst case that it scared out of my wits. I can give few examples here e.g. during first two years of COVID pandemic whenever I or any family member had symptoms of cold and flu, I started handling the worst case of being positive for COVID and how would I handle that situation. I have created plans who will isolate where in my house so many times just in apprehension of COVID and it affected my mental health along with daily arguments with my family members. Another example is that whenever I see any news or article about climate change, my worst case imagination goes till the end of the planet and in fact there is one dream appearing every few months for years where I see the planet being destroyed by some way or other. I have some examples which are so terrifying for me that I just don’t even want to write about them with fear in mind that they might come true if I share with others.
- Rules abiding — This one is not a side effect but I consider it side effect because most of the time I have been facing problems (e.g. stuck in traffic because I was the only one to follow the traffic lights) because of this attribute. I am not saying that a non Software Engineer is not rule abiding person, I have seen higher probability of rules (traffic rules, civic rules etc) abiding in Software Engineers who are sufficiently good at their work. I attribute this trait to need of following best practices in Software Engineering to product good deliverables. This becomes your habit to follow the rules or best practices because you know last time, when you didn’t follow the proper naming convention in your code, it had cost you two sleepless nights over a production issue.
Do you face these problems being Software Engineer? Do you see any other such attribute of being Software Engineer affecting your daily life? Let me know in comments.